Tag: Anthony Mackie

The Hurt Locker

“The Hurt Locker” is a pulse-pounding, hyper-realistic war epic but also a moving character study.

It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.

For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.

This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.

“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film. Continue reading “The Hurt Locker”

The Adjustment Bureau

“The Adjustment Bureau” is silly and light but thrives on its chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt… and fedoras.

The argumentative fallacy known as insufficient cause asserts the distance between a given cause and effect in a situation. This logic can be applied in “The Adjustment Bureau,” as in, because Matt Damon did not spill coffee on his shirt one morning, he may have prevented a third golden age in civilization.

There is considerable distance between that cause and effect, but man, Matt Damon looks good in a fedora.

“The Adjustment Bureau” hinges on that balance between a plot that ranges from odd to preposterous and the unfettered silliness of it all, not to mention the charming chemistry between Damon and co-star Emily Blunt.

Damon as an actor can range from stoic action badass in the Bourne movies to suave comic foil in everything from “Ocean’s 11,” “The Informant!” and “30 Rock.” Director and screenwriter George Nolfi has written for Damon in both “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Ocean’s 12,” and he gives Damon free range to act, sticking him in 90 percent of the scenes and encouraging him to casually roll with the screenplay’s absurd punches. Thankfully, Damon capitalizes on every minute, and throughout “The Adjustment Bureau,” his David Norris remains a likable and confident leading man.

At the beginning of the film, David is a 24-year-old senate candidate for New York, famous as a youthful, yet authentic and loose cannon of a politician. Following a scandal at his college reunion, Norris loses the election but meets Elise (Blunt) in of all places, the men’s room as he rehearses his concession speech. The pair hit it off perfectly, notably from the performers and less the script, and that connection carries us throughout the rest of the film.

Thank goodness, because it is at this point that things get weird and silly. Continue reading “The Adjustment Bureau”